How to Manage Your Store's Content Effectively and Efficiently

Introduction

If you're a new hire at EYStudios, you'll hear the following on a weekly basis: "First you have to get good, then you have to get fast, and then you can get good and fast."

In order to help you get good (and then fast) with managing your store, I'd like to compare different styles that I have observed and analyze the pros and cons of each. I hope you find this article helpful in managing your store more efficiently and more effectively.

EYStudios has designed and programmed hundreds of sites, and every store owner that we've worked with has had different methodologies on how to manage their store. From our perspective, there are three basic types of content management styles. Although there is a fourth type that uses more advanced third party software to update content, it will not be covered in this article.

Before we begin, we must remember that there are also four basic page types of your Yahoo! Store. The four types include the home page, the section pages, the product pages, and the utility pages. For those unfamiliar with the term "utility page," here's a brief overview: Utility pages are pages such as about us, contact us, and privacy policy -- pages that don't feature products, but are nevertheless useful to customers.

We must also remember that learning the lingo helps in learning the topic. With that in mind, let's review a few key terms to remember:

The first term is categorization, which refers to how product pages fall under section pages. The next term is page properties. Every page that is created on your Yahoo! Store has a unique set of properties. These properties include: name, caption, price, sale-price, image, and contents. There are also many more properties that are available, and you also have the ability to create new custom properties. The last term we will review is variables. Variables are related to the page properties, with the exception of variables that are used site wide. Variables are only available in the store editor.

Now we are ready to discuss the content management types.

Using the Store Editor for Updating

The first type of content management style uses the store editor for every content update function. These functions include adding new products, updating properties (product descriptions, prices, images, section properties and homepage properties), and product categorization. Being able to efficiently navigate through the store editor has many benefits -- the number one benefit being that every single editable property or variable is just a click or two away.

Using the store editor is the only way to update the site-wide variables. For example, if you wanted to update the words "Sale Price" on your product pages to say "Our Price," you could simply click Variables while in the store editor and update the sale-price-text field that we create with every new design. During our design and programming process, the need to add many other custom properties arise. For instance, we use custom properties for all of our landing page graphics, links, and alt tags. By not hard-coding our landing page images we give our customers the ability to update their own landing page images, links, and alt tags. The same is true for features such as our featured product rows, homepage rotating graphics, and featured item frames. Although it is possible to update these properties with a CSV file upload, we suggest to our clients to use the store editor to update these properties. This allows the clients to test the updates that are made before they publish. For a few custom property updates and variable updates, the store editor is definitely the way to go.

With any manual process, however, everyone knows that it is more time consuming than an automated process. With this in mind, I would not recommend adding every single product of your store through the store editor. If you have several hundred or several thousand products, it would be a very time consuming task to add these products manually when you first open your store.

Using CSV Files to Manage Your Store

The second type of content management style uses the CSV database upload function to make all updates. The catalog manager is a very powerful tool. You have the ability to download your existing inventory, make edits, and upload the edited data. CSV is an acronym for "Comma Separated Values." With Microsoft Excel, you have the ability to open and manipulate CSV files. Being able to efficiently use the catalog manager and CSV files gives you complete control over any of your store page's properties.

There are a few drawbacks to sticking only to this method. The first drawback is not being able to update the variables from the catalog manager. The second drawback, especially with new store owners, is that the relationship with getting to know your page types falls short. Although the Path property is available in the catalog manager to specify the product's destination, I would recommend getting familiar with the section pages and item pages by adding a few IDs to the contents field either manually or by cutting and pasting in the editor and observing the results.

After you understand how the contents field works, then you should be able to use the Path property to setup the rest of the categorization.

Put 'Em Together

In my opinion, the third type of content management style is the most effective. This style uses a combination of the store editor and the catalog manager to accomplish results. As we now know, the two previous styles have pros and cons. For every con in one style, the other style has a pro. It only makes sense to use a combination of the two.

Let's say you have a store that sells shoes, and one of your suppliers just informed you that they would not be supplying any type of leather shoe after December 31. This is because the CEO made a New Year's resolution to help his supplying company become a leading player in the suede shoe industry. If you were familiar with the catalog manager, you could log in, download your existing product database, sort a few fields in excel, delete some products, and re-upload/rebuild your database.

Now let's say that the same supplier called you the day before the Super Bowl. He just heard that Bruce Springsteen will be wearing a suede boot that you carry during his halftime performance. They are expecting a 1000% increase in sales, and they want you to raise the price by 50%. If this occurs, you could login to the store editor, navigate to the suede boot page, and click Edit. Next, you would manually type in the newly increased price, click Update and then Publish. As you can see, different types of updates require different types of content management styles.

Every minute that you invest in your Yahoo! Store makes you one minute better than your competition. I recommend setting up the Yahoo! Web Analytics package if it is available to you. This will allow you to see the real results from all of the hard work and effort put forth into maintaining your store. Learning about every aspect of the backend of your Yahoo! Store will prove beneficial. With this knowledge, you'll be more prepared to make the necessary updates to your store efficiently and effectively.